[Wine] How can we improve WNE?

[Austin English]

On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 9:59 AM, Warren Dumortier <nwarrenfl at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello everybody.
>
> I'm a (quite) happy WINE user, but i would like to propose some things to
> the WINE developers.
>
> Something important imo, is that it must be easy to use for the user, and
> some things could be better, here are some ideas to improve it by using
> Winecfg:
>
> 1. Add an option to disable/enable/edit debug channels for all programs. As
> you may know, a lot of programs runs faster (especially games, can be +40%
> faster), so having an easy way to do this thourgh Winecfg would be a nice
> idea.

Not a bad idea. The only problem is that if we then need debugging
information, it's all gone. I think a better solution would be to add
"WINEDEBUG=-all" when ran from a .desktop and not from terminal.

> 2. Be able to configure some registry kets through Winecfg, especially
> OffscreenRenderingMode, UseGLSL and VideoMemorySize, why not put a button in
> the Graphics tab that would show up an "Advanced condifuration" window?

I filed a bug for this, and started on making one, but it's a bit hard
to edit .rc files if you don't have visual studio...See
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14776.

> 3. When a program crashes, show up a window with the debugging information,
> so you shouldn't always run the program in terminal. And if debugging is
> disabled, say to the user it crashed, but he/she needs to enable debugging.

This has been proposed a few times before, mostly a Dr. Watson type
debugger. A simple window to tell the user the program crashed,
however, doesn't sound as familiar. I don't think, however, you'd find
much support for it, and hardly anyone would want to spend time coding
it. If you've got a patch, however, the odds are improved.

> 4. Optional imo and not very important imo: add some color schemes in
> Winecfg, not themes, but some color variations. But that's really not needed
> in my opinion.

That's been discussed, as the job of the distro to provide some
default matching schemes.

-- 
-Austin